How do I handle email tickets that have not been properly replyed to. A new ticket number is assigned for each reply. I guess I'm interested to know if there is a best practice to handle this, or if the is a "merge" utility for tickets like there is for users.

Most likely you want to know how to configure the application to convert email replays into activities rather than create new tickets. In order for the Mail Connector to understand that responses to E-mail are related to a ticket you will need to add the following string to the subject line of all emails being sent from the business logic:

MessageID:%[Ticket]%#

Keep in mind that when using business logic for activities the %[Ticket]% variable changes due to the hierarchy. In turn the following would be added to the E-mail of an activity:

To add onto what Gen said, we usually recommend, when a customer doesn't reply to an email with a "MessageID:" and in turn creates a duplicate ticket...relate it to the original with the relationship type Duplicated by...close it and update the original ticket.

Afterwards we warn the customer that they should reply to the original email and/or update their ticket via the web portal or their message may not get handled as quickly.

Additionally, in emails sent out you can also warn end users that if they don't reply to that ticket it could be misrouted, etc.

We do pretty much everything that you and moroz outlined. The relationship suggestion was what I was looking for. Is there a way to automatically update a parent ticket with an activity if a child closure code is "duplicate ticket" ?

Kgarello wrote:Is there a way to automatically update a parent ticket with an activity if a child closure code is "duplicate ticket" ?

Regardless of the terminology there's no way to create an activity with a business rule, but typically what I do to speed this up is to use an activity template.

I'll relate the ticket as a duplicate in Related Objects and then have an activity template setup called Duplicate Ticket. This template sets the fields to what I want and then business logic will set the fields in the ticket the way I want it to.

So while you do have to create the activity, it's not too bad since you just drop down the menu, choose it and click ok, done.